Recognized UN Borders

[Brian Wahl]

Hi, me again with another question. Is there a way to change the country borders to reflect the UN recognized borders? There seem to be a handful of differences between 'rworldmap' and the official UN borders (http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/map/profile/world.pdf). For example, Western Sahara seems to be of different sizes, Somaliland is not recognized by the UN, and Kashmir is represented as disputed (i.e., with dashed lines) by the UN.

[Jean-Baka Domelevo Entfellner]

Hello Brian, Andy and the group,

You are right, Brian, and I already mentioned that issue some time ago (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rworldmap/O06bnf5lEDk). The problem comes from the fact that Andy (who developed rworldmap) used data from the Natural Earth project (http://www.naturalearthdata.com/) to define the country polygons. Natural Earth is US-based, and for a long time they seem to have been drawing their data more from the CIA World Factbook than from the UN Cartographic Section, which is a pity. But they seem now to be willing to take into account disputed territories from the UN viewpoint, see e.g. http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/10m-admin-0-breakaway-disputed-areas/.

So currently rworldmap is nice for people who don't care too much about accurate UN-compliant boundaries between territories. If we want to have correct boundaries in Rworldmap, two ways:
(1) either redefine the polygons ourselves, as I have done for the countriesCoarse map of Africa, or
(2) check whether Natural Earth has released a UN-compliant version of the world. By the way, I don't know whether spdf objects allow to define a polygon with certain edges being solid lines, and others being dotted lines... Not sure :(

I would be happy to contribute, whichever way forward we choose. Andy, I think I remember that some time ago you mentioned you would or had created a github repository, is this https://github.com/cran/rworldmap? Is this the current version?

Regards,

   JB

On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 8:53 PM, Brian Wahl <bpw...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, me again with another question. Is there a way to change the country borders to reflect the UN recognized borders? There seem to be a handful of differences between 'rworldmap' and the official UN borders (http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/map/profile/world.pdf). For example, Western Sahara seems to be of different sizes, Somaliland is not recognized by the UN, and Kashmir is represented as disputed (i.e., with dashed lines) by the UN.

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[Andy South]

Hi Brian, JB,

Thanks for your input. JB is right and this has prompted me to submit his fix of at least the first 2 of these to CRAN. Which I should do later today.

The development version with the better African countries (thanks JB!) in is on Github and you can install with :

require(devtools)    
install_github('AndySouth/rworldmap', build_vignettes=TRUE)

but if you can wait a few days it should be on CRAN too ...

Also if you wanted to plot disputed areas with a dotted line you could get them into a spdf (spatial polygons data frame) and do something like :plot(spdf, lty=2, add=TRUE)

 

Best,

Andy

[Gavin Shaddick]

Hello, 

Firstly, thank you for producing such an excellent package. 

I was wondering whether it might be possible to get some advice on how to go about 

(1) either redefine the polygons ourselves, as I have done for the countriesCoarse map of Africa

As I have to do something similar for other countries (for which I have shape files)

Apologies if this question is out of place, my R-GIS skills probably aren't what they should be!

Thank you, 

Gavin